Category Archives: economics

But what about “the environment”? Economics are meaningless compared to Mother Earth, aren’t they? And anyway, there’s no connection between wealth and clean, healthy environments. Well, the enviro-friendly White House seems to be rethinking that edict, as is usually the case whenever the rubber meets the road: White House Rejects Controversial Ozone Regs President Barack…

It is the insurmountable flaw in all leftist philosophy, the insoluble contradiction, the problem that cannot be overcome: No matter what form that leftist philosophy takes — whether it be progressive, egalitarian, democratic-socialist, welfare-statist, communistic, or any other name those of this mindset wish to call it — in order to redistribute wealth, there must…

And he unloads with good reason. Steve Wynn, by the way, is no consistent capitalist, as he himself as much as says when he announces his support for that dingy quack Harry Reid. And yet Steve Wynn is on the money here: I believe in Las Vegas. I think its best days are ahead of…

It is, to say the least of it, a very horrifying thing indeed that someone in this position of power actually believes an economic canard of this caliber — a canard that’s been bunked a billion times, and which, in fact, is so easily debunked — and yet it’s even more horrifying to realize that…

Just recently, Barack Obama said, for the five or sixth hundredth time in the last year and a half: “The worst thing we could do is to go back to the very same policies that created this mess in the first place.” He was referring of course to the profligate policies instituted under George W.…

“I don’t,” said Barack Obama, when asked this morning if he regrets labeling the past three months of economic catastrophe a Recovery Summer. Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary Robert Reich does not, however, agree: Doug Powers speculates that the following photos help explain Barack Obama’s inexplicable label: (Hat tip HotAirPundit)

From a Providence newspaper, local fishermen are infuriated over the Obama administration’s junk science catch limits: “All these politicians scream about is jobs, jobs, jobs. Why are they putting us out of business?” Another local fishermen took out the following full-page ad in the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette: EDGARTOWN, Massachusetts – Aug 24, 2010 – The…

Jim Cox is one of my favorite living economists. His slim but pregnant book — The Concise Guide To Economics — is a miniature masterpiece. The following comes from Chapter 37: The Spanish Scholastics of 14th through 17th century Spain had produced a body of thought largely similar to our modern understanding of economics. The…

In the Concise Guide To Economics, author and economist Jim Cox correctly explains that the Multiplier is one of the major components of Keynesian policy. For those who still don’t know it, Keynesian economics — named after John Maynard Keynes — are the economics that Barack Obama, as well as George W. Bush (et al),…

Here’s an economic axiom which we’ve discussed here before, but which in this day and age is always worth repeating: If something is economically tenable, it never ever needs to be subsidized. The latest concretization of this fact comes from none other than the state-run Associated Press: After a year of crippling delays, President Barack…

There are approximately twenty million myths about markets and market capitalism, one of the most common being this: Markets don’t work well (or are inefficient) when there are negative or positive “externalities.” Here’s how Tom Palmer, philosopher and economist, bunks that canard: The mere existence of an externality is no argument for having the state…

Political theory is the theory of government. It is a sub-branch of ethics, and economics, in turn, is a sub-branch of politics. Ethics — the science of human action — precedes politics because politics is the science of human action in societies, and societies are composed only of individuals. For this reason, the individual has…

Speaking of clams without shells, it was in the late 1980’s that McDonald’s was bullied by burgeoning environmental groups (who were concerned about “how many trees it takes to make paper” ) into switching from paper packaging to Styrofoam containers. These containers are what McDonald’s soon came to call (apparently without irony) “clam shells.” Clam…

Everyone believes in freedom — until everyone finds out what freedom actually means. Then almost no one believes in it. Freedom means you are left alone; you are neither helped nor hindered. And that’s all it means. Rightwing politicos and leftwing politicos don’t usually agree on specifics, but they do often agree on principle: namely,…

What is now termed modern medicine actually began in the early 1920s when science — in particular, germ theory — culminated to a point that sickness and disease were at last being treated reliably. It was then that doctors and hospitals got much better at the business of saving lives. This more highly developed service…